Productive sanitation – the honey suckers of Bengaluru

The dumping of untreated faecal sludge in urban areas has been described as an ecological time bomb. In African cities, typically less than 15 percent of residents are served by centralised sewage systems, and figures for Asian countries are not much better. Yet there is a growing number of examples where re-use of urban faecal waste as fertiliser is linking city households and peri-urban farmers in a chain that provides both affordable sanitation and soil fertility. A recent study of sanitation services provided in Bengaluru (Bangalore), in southern India, suggests such approaches deserve to be legalised and scaled up within an appropriate legal framework to ensure the safety of farm workers and consumers.

Dear Yanti, I have just moved your post about your paper ("Towards sustained sanitation services: a review of existing frameworks and an alternative framework combining ecological and sanitation life stage approaches.") into this thread as it fits better here. (if anyone wants to see the link just scrol up to her post on 13 Oct). As it's not a […]

Dear Sanjay, I can't really picture how you would set this directory up and who could add to it? It reminds me a little bit of two existing pages on Wikipedia which might inspire you: - Water pollution in India: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_pollution_in_India - Indian states and union territories ranked by prevalence of open defecation en.wikipedia.org/w […]

You are so right about pointing out the earth-shattering news, Arno! Let's all forget about quoting that 2.4 billion figure for people without access to improved sanitation (from the MDG era). I think the new figure to keep "pushing" into people's attention is 4.5 billion people without access to safely managed sanitation. I am doing my b […]

Welcome to Aquaya as a new SuSanA partner! I first came across Aquaya via a project they had funded by the Gates Foundation which I had added to the SuSanA project database for them: It was called "Cash on delivery for water quality testing", see here: www.susana.org/en/knowledge-hub/projects/database/details/150 It ended in 2015 - do you have any […]